Today is a holiday set aside to honor those who have served in the US armed forces. Most Americans just use it as an excuse to grill and subject extended relatives to inebriated declamations of their political beliefs. So it seemed like a good occasion to explore some actual military history.
The fine folks over at Midnight Broadcast made a slight departure from form to relate the firsthand account of an Illinois boy who went off to the Spanish-American War. It’s an eye-opening look back at a time not so long ago in historic terms, yet which may as well have been millennia ago.
Watch and enjoy:
That soldier’s personal recollections are all the more haunting now since we know his war was fought on false pretext. It goes to show that using the press to psyop the public into supporting wars of choice isn’t a 2000s phenomenon. Nor was it invented in the 1990s. The media carrying water for hawks in Washington goes back to the 1890s at least.
The tendency in dissident circles is to idolize the 1950s and trace the fall of the West to the 1960s. But the foregoing supports the observation that Western Christendom proper has been gone for more than a century.
Worshiping the past in a misguided attempt to resuscitate it is not a reason to study history. Learning from the mistakes of the past to avoid them in the future we want to build is.
Of course, the wars of the future will be fought by giant robots.
Get ahead of the curve.
Read my epic mech saga’s mind-bending finale:
Brian,
Thanks. Happy Memorial day to you and fellow Americans.
Yeah, the Spanish American war was tragic, for the Cubans who were about to live in peace, the Spanish who marched towards the civil war. And for the Americans who became interventionists.
xavier
Thank you.